Announcing: The Above Grade Level Seminar Series

Not your average reading group, for parents and supporters of not-average kids

As 2025 ends, I’m feeling so grateful for you wonderful readers and the chance to work on education full-time. Serendipitously rejoining the education world via my daughters’ school - over a decade after dropping out of a PhD in the philosophy of education at Columbia’s Teachers College - has been the biggest win of my professional life.

Gifted programs elsewhere will sadly remain under attack in 2026. But the GT School team will continue growing our flagship brick & mortar school north of Austin, TX while we also roll out GT Anywhere, the remote version.

Attempted justifications for holding bright students back within the traditional school system have never been weaker, but individual parents of the gifted remain stuck learning and advocating in isolation.

(Worse still, short-form video sources are full of slop about gifted issues that may do more damage than good, but that’s a post for another time…)

So I’m setting my 2026 sights on growing the very best community for parents and supporters of gifted students. A regular parent group, full of drive-by panicked questions and passive lurkers and MLM marketers, simply won’t do.

Instead, I hereby convene the Above Grade Level Seminar series: a monthly reading-and-discussion series on gifted education for parents, educators, and other supporters of advanced learners.

We’re kicking off January’s seminar by reading “A Nation Deceived,” the now-classic 2004 Templeton National Report on Acceleration. I strongly suggest focusing on volume 1, the summary, rather than reading all 200 pages of primary source text in volume 2.

I’ll schedule a live discussion one evening late in January, followed by an open Substack discussion thread for continued conversation (so you can join even if bedtime runs late).

To participate, just make sure that you’re subscribed to Above Grade Level here on Substack and you’ll receive the reading link, event invite, and thread access in the coming weeks. Come ready to compare research with real-world experience and to leave with concrete next steps for your student.

In the meantime, read 2025’s most popular Above Grade Level post: Grade Levels: A Quick History.